Anthony Fauci's Senate testimony this week is about accountability as much as answers, writes GB News presenter Bev Turner
For years, Anthony Fauci was held up as "America's doctor" – the reassuring face of the United States' coronavirus pandemic response.
This Wednesday, he will be sitting in the witness chair instead. And if the British government wants to understand how they were manipulated into quarantining a healthy population and triggering most of the economic and social woes we now suffer, they must pay attention.
Senator Rand Paul has confirmed Fauci will testify under oath before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on July 29. Fauci will face questions over one of the most controversial chapters of the Covid story: US funding for gain-of-function research linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, the origins of the virus and allegations key information was kept from the public.
This matters because once the proximal origin "bat theory" is fully debunked, it may be possible to trace the birth of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Namely, who funded its creation and why?
Paul made the announcement during last week's MAHA Media Hub briefing, describing the hearing as another step towards uncovering what really happened before the pandemic engulfed the world. For years, anyone suggesting Covid may have leaked from a laboratory was dismissed as a conspiracy theorist.
That position has shifted dramatically. The lab leak theory is now considered the most credible possibility by many scientists and intelligence agencies.
Attention has increasingly turned to the role played by those who shaped the public narrative in the earliest days of the pandemic – in the US, at least. The UK inquiry is still concerned with whether we should have locked down sooner and harder rather than with who is to blame for the biggest event of our lifetimes.
At the centre of Senator Paul's latest claims are newly released Slack messages between scientists involved in writing the influential 2020 paper The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2. The paper was widely cited as evidence Covid almost certainly emerged naturally.
Slack is a messaging platform used by companies and government organisations: a cross between WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams. Instead of sending emails, colleagues chat in channels, direct messages and group conversations.
In this instance, the Slack messages are significant because they reveal what scientists were saying to one another privately, which can then be compared with what they were saying publicly at the same time. Paul argues the private conversations tell a rather different story.
Senator Kristian Andersen – one of the paper's lead authors and a scientist who later received significant NIH funding – privately discussed there being around a 30 per cent chance the virus originated in a laboratory, despite publicly dismissing that possibility. Another author, Eddie Holmes, is also said to have privately acknowledged the lab leak theory could not be ruled out.
Paul claims the messages show scientists carefully discussing how they communicated with government officials and intelligence agencies while seeking to avoid creating records that could later be obtained through Freedom of Information requests.
Those allegations are likely to be a major focus when Fauci appears before the committee. Paul has also published documents relating to British zoologist Peter Daszak, the former president of EcoHealth Alliance.
This New York-based non-profit channelled millions of dollars in US government research funding to scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology before the pandemic. Daszak became one of the most controversial figures in the Covid origins debate after helping to organise an early public statement dismissing the lab leak hypothesis, while his organisation's links to Wuhan later came under intense scrutiny.
I was one of the few journalists to identify his potential role in the pandemic in 2021 and asked him to answer questions publicly on X, formerly known as Twitter. He quickly blocked me.
One of the more striking claims concerns Daszak's return to the US in early 2021 after taking part in the World Health Organisation's Covid origins mission to Wuhan. According to documents released by Paul's office, US Customs and Border Protection officials planned to stop and question him because of his longstanding links to the Wuhan laboratory and EcoHealth Alliance's role in funding coronavirus research there.
Paul says the FBI intervened before Daszak landed, instructing border officials not to carry out the planned search, allowing him to enter the country without further questioning. The senator has now asked the Justice Department's Inspector General to investigate whether Daszak or prominent Covid researcher Ralph Baric had any relationship with the FBI as confidential informants – a claim for which no evidence has yet been made public.
Fauci will no doubt argue none of this proves that Covid originated in a laboratory. He will certainly claim he did no wrong and was acting in the best interests of the world.
Yet after years in which questions were often dismissed rather than examined, Congress is now asking them in public – and under oath. The British government and the establishment media in the UK are determined to avoid looking back.
It appears they know they let the people down by refusing to ask the right questions. Money-printing, lockdowns, school closures and sweeping public health restrictions reshaped societies, damaged economies and transformed public trust in government and science.
For Paul, the July 29 hearing is about accountability as much as answers – whether it produces either remains to be seen, but in America, at least, there exists the will to try. As one of the many people "cancelled" in 2021 for asking such questions, I will be in the room on Wednesday as a keen observer.
I will let GB News followers know whether we get any closer to the truth.
